Welcome to the July 2003 issue of the CyberArtisans monthly newsletter!

Our goal is to present information that will be useful to you as a web site owner. If these newsletters are not useful to you, please forward this to a friend who will find it useful. To unsubscribe, follow the directions at the bottom of this email.

Fun 'n Games

The web business is a rapidly evolving field, so we are always researching something. And frequently, in addition to the item we were looking for, we stumble across lots of other things. Some are useful in the current situation, others will probably be useful in some other situation, and a certain number are, well, totally useless. But oddly enough, many of the useless items are fun and this is the category we'll take a look at today.

If you've ever spent time with programmers, you know that they have a tough time staying serious. Sure, they will focus on the job and get it done, but at some point, they just have to let off some steam by creating something totally off topic. In the past, these diversions got spread around the office and forgotten, but now it's so easy to put them on the web that they effectively get archived for anyone to find.

We have compiled a few of the best of these. Go to http://www.cyberartisans.com/fun.htm and try them out.

SSL Certificates

What's an SSL Certificate and why would you want one? An SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Certificate, also known as a Secure Server Certificate, provides two services:

1. It assures any visitor that your website really is the website it purports to be. This is more of an issue than you might think, especially when money is in the equation. There are more than a few fraudulent sites purporting to be what they are not to separate the unwary from their money. The certificate provides assurance from a third-party (the certificate-issuing authority) that your company has demonstrated its legitimacy to them and has also provided a demonstrable link between the company and the website using the certificate.

2. It enables encryption between your web server and your visitor's browser, so that any financial transactions (most commonly credit card numbers) are encrypted before being sent out over the Internet. When encryption is enabled, the small padlock appears on the taskbar of Internet Explorer.

The beauty of an SSL certificate is that a site visitor doesn't have to do anything except make sure the padlock appears in the IE taskbar whenever he or she is entering sensitive information like a credit card number. Unless a visitor alters the browser default settings, browsers are set to check the validity of any SSL certificate and notify the user if an invalid one is detected. You can check your settings in IE by going into Tools | Internet Options, clicking on the Advanced tab, and scrolling down to the bottom where the Security settings are. Make sure that "Use SSL 2.0" and "Use SSL 3.0" are checked as well as "Warn about invalid site certificates."

The most common use for an SSL certificate is for an e-commerce website. And usually it's part of a package and not something you worry about separately. But not always, and sometimes it's worth shopping around to get a better deal. Our Midwest associate, Sewell Webs (http://www.sewellwebs.com) is a reseller of SSL Certificates. Contact them or us for more information.

Google Toolbar 2.0 Beta

If you don't use the Google Toolbar on your browser, it's something worth considering, especially the latest 2.0 version, even though it's technically still in beta (for those of you who don't do software development on a regular basis, a product is considered in "beta" when the manufacturer has tested it extensively but still feels it's worth cautioning users that it may still have a few bugs). The Google toolbar version 2.0 provides several interesting services:

1. Instant Google searches of the web.

2. Instant Google searches of the site you are currently visiting.

3. Page ranking of the page you are visiting, giving you a rough rating of the popularity of that page.

4. Autofill, which lets you fill in the most common entries on a form by just clicking a button.

5. Popup blocking that seems to work as well or better than any other service we've heard of.

Note that there is one catch -- if you enable PageRank, each time you visit a web page your system sends the URL to Google (that's how they determine a page's popularity rating). Google insists that PageRank only sends the URL to Google, and never passes identifying information even if it's included in the URL. And unlike other vendors who conceal this sort of operation, Google is very upfront about it. They also offer a version of the toolbar without PageRank that does not send any information to Google. With or without PageRank, it's a handy addition to the browser and something we use a lot. And if you don't like it, you can easily uninstall it.

Thanks for joining us this month. See you next month.

Jonathan Spencer
CyberArtisans Web Developers

http://www.cyberartisans.com/
617-965-4110